News
The Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge – population 2,000 – had its internet-bearing cable chewed through in the early hours of Saturday.
Beavers were the culprits in this crime against rural information distribution as they got their sizable incisors into the 4.5-inch conduit connecting the town on the edge of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia.
According to a local news outlet, service provider Telus said internet was down for about 900 customers in the community, presumably interrupting the nocturnal enjoyment of Due South or something.
Spokeswoman Liz Sauvé said in a statement that the incident was "very bizarre and uniquely Canadian" after workers discovered a beaver chewed through cabling near their dam at multiple points.
The semi-aquatic mammals, native to North America and Europe, are known for their dam building, and some have created structures more than 800m in width.
Sauvé said the beaver appears to have dug alongside the creek to reach the buried cable, which they succeeded in severing in several locations.
Photos from the site appeared to show the beavers used the material from the cabling to help create their dam-based dwellings.
Telus said it had restored online services by mid-afternoon on Sunday, although added that mobile signal might be unreliable while repairs continued.
It's not the first time rodents have taken the blame for patchy internet service. In 2017, rats were said to have caused "extensive damage" in South London by chewing through fibre, leaving customers without broadband. Sky and TalkTalk apologised for the loss of service to Tulse Hill, Balham, Brixton, Nine Elms, Streatham, Dulwich, Vauxhall, South Clapham, Forest Hill, and Battersea.
On the other side of the world, rodents caused a similar outage in Auckland, New Zealand. There, an unidentified creature chomped a 144-fibre strand cable operated by Chorus affecting the Massey suburb, as well as those in Swanson, Ranui, Westgate, and parts of West Harbour.
Bloom & Wild, a London-based online flower delivery and gifting platform has acquired the entire share capital of bloomon, a Netherlands-based competitor, for an undisclosed sum.
Post the acquisition, Bloom & Wild has become the largest online operator in the region’s £22 billion flowers and house plant market by a number of deliveries.
“This is a great deal for both companies, all team members and our customers. The acquisition delivers immediate scale across Europe and provides new and exciting opportunities for all staff from both businesses, who will be retained to drive ambitious growth across the continent. The entire management team is fully committed and invested in the long term success of the enlarged business and we are thrilled to invest in both brands as we accelerate our plans for European expansion,” said Bart Troost, CEO of bloomon, who will take up the new role of Chief International Officer.
Patrick Hurenkamp will retain his current position as Chief Innovation Officer and alongside Troost will report directly to Aron Gelbard who will be CEO of the enlarged business.
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Odore, a London, UK-based beauty tech startup, raised $830k in funding.
The round was led by SFC Capital and joined by RLC Ventures.
The company will use the funds to expand the engineering team and further improve their end-to-end marketing solutions for beauty and cosmetics brands.
Launched by university friends Armaan Mehta and Karan Gupta, Odore provides a product sampling and marketing platform that uses data driven methods to ensure products and campaigns reach the right customers. The company works with global brands including Guerlain, Clive Christian and L’Oréal.
Following the deal, the technology will now enable physical marketing such as samples and testers to be integrated alongside social media, email and paid advertising campaigns, as well as offering augmented reality integrations.
Odore, a London-based beauty startup that works with global brands including L’Oréal, Guerlain, and Clive Christian recently bagged $830K (nearly £595K).
The investment round was led by SFC Capital along with participation from RLC Ventures. Odore aims to revolutionise how cosmetics and beauty businesses market their products to consumers. With the fund, the team eyes to expand their technology offering to cover a wider range of beauty marketing needs, thereby enabling clients to launch measurable and tailored digital marketing campaigns that can be run and measured through a centralised dashboard.
This is important at a time when more than half of the spend of $68 billion in the global Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry’s digital marketing last year failed to see a positive return on investment (ROI).
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The nutritional supplement market is no small business as consumers spend upwards of £442 million every year on product purchases. The UK-based health company Feel aims to “clean up” this segment that is apparently rife with supplements offering shoddy quality, fillers and ineffective nutrients. The company has now raised £4.5 million in its latest funding round to further its goal.
The latest funding round for Feel was led by Fuel Ventures and included TMT Investments, Sova VC, Richard Longhurst, LoveHoney.com founder, and Igor Ryabenkiy, founder and GP of Altair Capital.
This funding round will enable Feel to expand its business across EMEA and target new verticals to serve pregnancy, kids, pets and cognition. While the company’s CEO, Boris Hodakel, didn’t tell us exactly where they will offer their services next, he mentions it will be somewhere in mid-Europe, followed by other EU countries.
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London-based Payhawk, a fintech platform that unifies all company payments and expense management secured $20 million in a Series A funding round. This investment comes 12 months after completing its seed round.
The funding round was led by US-based fund QED Investors, which has a good track record of investing in 18 fintech unicorns including Klarna and Nubank. Also, existing investor Earlybird Digital East, which led $3.6 million seed funding in Payhawk in March last year participated in the round. Besides them, Yusuf Ozdalga will join the company’s board along with existing investors Mehmed Atici from Earlybird Digital East and Vassil Terziev from Eleven Ventures.
The funds will let Payhawk expand its product offering further and grow its team. The company will expand coverage for businesses outside the EU and UK, add new payment products including credit cards, and support additional currencies with industry-leading FX rates. Also, the fintech will also work to streamline the cash flow from existing bank accounts to Payhawk to provide unlimited spending capabilities for finance teams.
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Starling Bank, a UK digital bank is the fastest-growing bank for small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe. Today, the company pocketed £50 million as an extension to the bank’s oversubscribed £272 million Series D funding round last month.
The investment into Starling Bank came from Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. With this round, the overall Series D funding raised accounts to £322 million and values the company in excess of £1.1 billion pre-money. This fund will support Starling’s continued, rapid and now profitable growth.
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Buy Now Pay Later or BNPL is one of the fastest growing online payments methods in the UK. Companies in this space include some notable names, one of which is the London-based BNPL startup Zilch. The company is one of the fastest-growing BNPL providers in the UK, with thousands of signups a day. It is also the first and only UK FCA regulated BNPL, and it has now raised a notable £57.8 million in its series B funding round.
USA launch and team expansion
The latest series B funding round for Zilch was led by numerous investors, including Gauss Ventures and M&F Fund. Including the latest funds, the company has managed to raise over £86.7 million in funds and is currently valued at over £361.4. With fresh funds, the startup intends to launch its services in the USA and grow its services further, in the UK.
Zilch currently has over 80 employees in the UK and plans to double its team size this year. It recently hired some top executives such as Werner Kruger, ex VP of Data Science at Klarna, Monese’s ex-Chief Analytics Officer as their new Chief Data Officer and more recently, Amabel Polglase, ex-Head of Global Clients at Facebook, as Zilch’s Chief Marketing Officer.
“Some of these new hires will be used to build a US presence in anticipation of expansion. With this in mind, at the moment we’re focused on finding the right people that can help us achieve our goals, rather than limiting ourselves to a particular US location – remote working technology means that isn’t a problem anymore,” Belamant notes.
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A couple of weeks back, Weezy — the hyperlocal delivery startup, launched its service in Bristol. And now, the company has announced a partnership with what3words to make locations easier to find and every Weezy delivery seamless.
Co-founded in London in 2013 by Chris Sheldrick, what3words is a human-friendly way to share very precise locations with other people.
The company has divided the world into a grid of 3m squares and given each a unique what3words address – made of three dictionary words.
For example, the viewpoint at the top of Hampstead Heath can be found at ///single.glow.most.
Further, what3words is optimised for voice input and contains built-in error prevention to immediately identify and correct input mistakes.
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The Ocado Group, a leading UK-based online grocery platform and solutions provider announced the partnership with the Oxford-based startup Oxbotica to develop a range of autonomous vehicles. The company has invested $13.8 million (nearly £10 million) and bought stake in the startup that develops autonomous driving systems.
Part of Series B investment
This investment from Ocado is a part of Oxbotica’s latest Series B equity funding round. The round was led by bp ventures and included other strategic and financial investors in the US, the UK, China and Australia including Tencent, Halma, BGF, HostPlus, IP Group, Venture Science, and funds advised by Doxa Partners. As a result, Ocado will take a seat on Oxbotica’s board as well.
As part of this collaboration, Ocado will outfit a subset of its delivery vans and warehouse vehicles with data capture capabilities, which may include video cameras, LiDAR, RADAR and other sensing devices. Ocado will make this data available to Oxbotica to train and test its technologies, which will then inform Ocado as to what opportunities exist and where best it might take advantage of these exciting new partnerships.
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